On Sun, 12 Apr 2009 12:04:20 -0700, Delirium wrote:
I think you might also be aiming at the wrong audience to some extent. You seem to accept the media-narrative "founder myth" of Wikipedia as this thing that sprang whole cloth out of nothingness due to the ingenuity of Jimmy Wales; save only that you'd like to modify the credit to include Larry Sanger in an equally or more prominent role. But my impression is that this is mainly an external view. Most of the knowledgeable Wikipedians I know take a more complex view, crediting to various degrees: Ward Cunningham's development of wikis; the development of community and social norms on WikiWikiWeb and MeatballWiki; the expansion of subject-specific wiki encyclopedias from the original design-patterns-encyclopedia focus of WikiWikiWeb to cover ever more areas of knowledge; the parallel cropping up of non-wiki "all human knowledge written by random people on the internet" compendia like Everything2; and so on.
... and Tim Berners-Lee for inventing the World Wide Web; the ARPAnet pioneers for creating the network on which the Web operated; Ted Nelson for inventing hypertext; Xerox PARC for creating the elements of the modern user interface that Apple stole from them and Microsoft stole from Apple; the original IBM PC development team for creating the PC platform which brought personal computers into the mainstream and made it possible for the Internet and Web to be a mass medium; Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs for showing that home computers were a reasonable idea in the first place; the developers of the Altair computer for showing that computers didn't have to be huge million- dollar hulks; the pioneers of mainframe computers for creating those million-dollar hulks in the first place and letting computer science begin as a discipline of knowledge; Edison and/or Tesla for making electricity ubiquitous and all those later devices possible; Ben Franklin for making discoveries about electricity the later inventors could build on.... and so on and on and on. Everybody builds on the discoveries and inventions of those who came before.
-----Original Message----- From: Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name To: wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Mon, 13 Apr 2009 6:56 pm Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] An open letter to Jimmy Wales
.... and Tim Berners-Lee for inventing the World Wide Web; the ARPAnet pioneers for creating the network on which the Web operated; Ted Nelson for inventing hypertext; .....; Edison and/or Tesla for making electricity ubiquitous and all those later devices possible; Ben Franklin for making discoveries about electricity the later inventors could build on.... and so on and on and on. Everybody builds on the discoveries and inventions of those who came before.
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And I would like to thank the Phoenicians for inventing the alphabet.
W.J. the Current.
On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 10:12 PM, wjhonson@aol.com wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name To: wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Mon, 13 Apr 2009 6:56 pm Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] An open letter to Jimmy Wales
.... and Tim Berners-Lee for inventing the World Wide Web; the ARPAnet pioneers for creating the network on which the Web operated; Ted Nelson for inventing hypertext; .....; Edison and/or Tesla for making electricity ubiquitous and all those later devices possible; Ben Franklin for making discoveries about electricity the later inventors could build on.... and so on and on and on. Everybody builds on the discoveries and inventions of those who came before.
And I would like to thank the Phoenicians for inventing the alphabet.
W.J. the Current.
I'd like to thank Necessity and her baby-daddy for inventing inventions.
On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 4:38 AM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 10:12 PM, wjhonson@aol.com wrote:
And I would like to thank the Phoenicians for inventing the alphabet.
W.J. the Current.
I'd like to thank Necessity and her baby-daddy for inventing inventions.
I was going to thank the Proto-Indo-Europeans, but this is getting silly.
--Oskar
On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 10:18 AM, Oskar Sigvardsson < oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 4:38 AM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 10:12 PM, wjhonson@aol.com wrote:
And I would like to thank the Phoenicians for inventing the alphabet.
W.J. the Current.
I'd like to thank Necessity and her baby-daddy for inventing inventions.
I was going to thank the Proto-Indo-Europeans, but this is getting silly.
Getting silly? It got silly several messages ago. There's a fundamental difference between the contributions to Wikipedia of Larry Sanger, and those of Ted Nelson (or Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Edison, Tesla, etc). I'll leave in Tim Berners-Lee since I believe he has expressed the notion that Wikipedia is similar to his vision of what the web would be, though I haven't investigated that.
Wikipedia was certainly a compromise between the visions of many individuals, but that doesn't mean those individual visions and accomplishments can't be separated, and instead we must resort to a generic "made by the community". If Wales can't get 100% credit as "sole founder", then he wishes credit to be given to no one at all, but that doesn't mean we have to follow that reductio ad absurdium.